The Real Papillon: How Much of Henri Charriere's Prison Escape Was a Lie?
- Aug 14, 2018
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
In 1969, a 62 year old former convict mailed thirteen handwritten notebooks to a publisher in Paris with a note attached: here are my adventures, get someone to write them up properly. The publisher didn't bother rewriting much of anything. The book came out almost exactly as he'd scrawled it, under the title Papillon, and by the end of the year it had sold over a million copies in France alone.
The man's name was Henri Charriere. He said the book was about 75 percent true. Historians who went looking for the other 25 percent found a lot more holes than that.
Who Was Papillon, Really?
Charriere was born in 1906 in a small village in the Ardeche region of France. His mother died when he was ten, and by his late teens he'd already done a stint in the French Navy before drifting into the Paris underworld. He became a safecracker and small time thief, and by some accounts worked as a pimp, a detail he spent the rest of his life denying.
In 1931 he was arrested for the murder of a man named Roland Le Petit, described in different accounts as either a pimp or a small time gangster. Charriere always swore he was innocent, framed by police looking for a quick conviction. The court didn't buy it. He got life imprisonment and ten years of hard labour, and was shipped off to the French penal colony in Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, a system not far removed from Britain's own brutal era of convict transport ships.
The nickname came from the tattoo on his chest: a butterfly, papillon in French. It stuck for the rest of his life, and eventually became the title of the book that made him famous.
Nine Escapes, One Coconut Raft
According to Papillon, Charriere didn't accept his sentence quietly. He claimed to have escaped from the penal colony nine separate times over fourteen years. The first attempt came after about a year inside, when he and two other prisoners stole a small boat and sailed close to 1,800 miles across open water, eventually landing near Riohacha in Colombia. They were caught, and he was sent back.
More escapes followed, along with more recaptures, at least according to his own telling. At one point he claims to have lived with an Indigenous tribe in the Guajira Peninsula, married two women from the community, and fathered children he later never mentioned again. At another, he says he spent close to two years in solitary confinement on Ile Saint-Joseph, locked in a pitch dark cell reportedly crawling with centipedes.
The final and most famous escape, in his account, happened from Devil's Island itself, the most secure part of the colony. Charriere and a fellow prisoner supposedly threw themselves into the sea on a raft made from sacks stuffed with coconuts, timing the jump to ride an outgoing wave past the rocks. His companion drowned in quicksand after they reached shore. Charriere kept going, eventually reaching Venezuela in 1944, or so the book says.
Building a New Life in Venezuela
Venezuela didn't hand him a free pass straight away. He spent about a year in a Venezuelan prison before being released for good in 1945. After that, he settled into something close to an ordinary life, at least by his standards. He pumped gas, prospected for gold, worked oil fields, and traded pearls before finally landing on something that stuck: running restaurants and nightclubs in Caracas and Maracaibo.
He married a Venezuelan woman and became a naturalised citizen, which mattered a great deal given that France and Venezuela had no extradition treaty at the time. His life sentence back home had never been overturned. As long as he stayed in Venezuela, he was untouchable.
By the late 1940s he'd opened Le Grand Cafe in Caracas, catering to locals and expats in a city that was expanding fast after the fall of its military government. He became something of a local personality too, regularly invited onto Venezuelan television to tell his story.
The Book That Made Him Rich, and Suspicious
At 62, Charriere read a memoir by Albertine Sarrazin, a former French prostitute turned bestselling author, and decided he had a better story to tell. He filled notebook after notebook and sent them to the publisher Robert Laffont in Paris. An editor there, Jean-Pierre Castelnau, was reportedly hooked from the first pages.
Papillon hit shelves in April 1969 and sold 700,000 copies in its first ten weeks. A French government minister later blamed the book, along with miniskirts, for the moral decline of the country, which probably did wonders for sales. By the time the dust settled it had sold over 1.5 million copies in France alone, and went on to inspire two feature films: the 1973 version with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and a 2017 remake with Charlie Hunnam.
The success brought scrutiny, and the scrutiny did not go well for Charriere's credibility.
So How Much of It Is Actually True?
A French Justice Ministry report looked into the book's claims and concluded that the events described should be “divided by at least 10” to get close to what actually happened. That's not a small caveat. Investigative journalist Gerard de Villiers reached similar conclusions in his own book, Papillon Epingle (“Butterfly Pinned”), and researchers found no record of Charriere serving time in some of the locations he describes in detail. Some of his most dramatic episodes appear to belong to other people entirely.
The most striking example involves the rescue of a guard's young daughter from a shark attack, a scene Charriere describes vividly in the book as his own doing. Critics have traced that story to a different convict, Alfred Steffen, who lost both legs in the incident and later died from his injuries. It's hard to read that detail and not feel for the man whose story got quietly absorbed into someone else's legend.
Then there's Charles Brunier, a man who came forward in 2005 at the age of 104, living in Paris, claiming he was the real Papillon. He had his own butterfly tattoo, on his left arm rather than his chest, and records confirm he was at the same prison at the same time as Charriere. A former Paris Match journalist, Georges Menager, went further still in a book called Les Quatre Verites de Papillon, alleging that Charriere had in fact been a police informer before his arrest, not just a thief, and that he'd tried to pin the original murder on his own girlfriend.
When journalists pushed him on inconsistencies and shaky dates while he was alive, Charriere had a ready answer: he didn't have a typewriter with a calendar attached to it in prison. It's a good line. It's not really an explanation.
The most likely explanation, according to people who've studied the book closely, is that Charriere combined his own genuine experiences with stories he picked up from other prisoners over fourteen years inside, stitching them into one continuous narrative with himself as the hero throughout. Whether that makes Papillon a memoir with embellishments or a novel wearing a memoir's clothing is still argued over today.
A Pardon, and a Quiet Ending
Whatever the truth ratio, the book worked exactly as Charriere must have hoped. Riding its success, he returned to France for the first time since his conviction and was pardoned by the French government in 1970, decades after the original case. He was treated as something close to a folk hero on his return, despite the murder conviction he'd never actually had overturned on factual grounds.
He wrote one more book, a sequel called Banco, covering his life after the prison years. He also took a small acting role in a 1970 French film. He died in July 1973 of throat cancer, at 66, just as Papillon was being adapted into the Hollywood film that would cement the story in popular memory for good, true or not. It's a strange kind of overlap with stories like Jacques Mesrine's decades of cat and mouse with French police, where the legend ends up outliving any reliable account of the facts.
Why the Story Still Lands
Maybe the most honest way to put it is this: Papillon doesn't really survive as journalism, but it survives just fine as myth. Charriere took fourteen brutal years, his own and possibly other men's, and shaped them into a single defiant story about refusing to accept a life sentence handed down by a system he believed had failed him. People didn't buy a million copies because every fact checked out. They bought it because it's a hell of a story about not giving up, told by a man who clearly knew how to tell one.
That tension, between the man as he was and the legend he built for himself, is probably the most interesting thing about his story even now. By the end he'd already become the character. The real Henri Charriere, whoever exactly that was, had pretty much disappeared into him. It's a far cry from escape stories with paper trails to back them up, like John Dillinger's wooden gun breakout or the Nantes courthouse hostage crisis, both of which are at least well documented in police and court records.
Sources
1. Wikipedia, "Henri Charriere," overview of biographical details and critical reception.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Henri Charriere," including references to Menager's and de Villiers' debunking books.
3. Robert Walsh, "Papillon: The Butterfly Pinned," Crimescribe, on Gerard de Villiers' investigation and penal colony records.
4. Skeptoid, "On the Trail of Papillon," episode 848.
5. Charriere, Henri. Papillon (memoir). Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.
